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Safari Beta Takeup Tops Firefox, IE and Chrome
nk497 writes "The release of the beta for the next version of Apple's Safari browser last week helped drive Apple's market share above ten per cent. The Safari beta has gained users at a rate of about 0.5 per cent a day since its release, topping one per cent by day four. For comparison, Microsoft's beta of IE took six months to hit one percent, Chrome needed almost a month, and Firefox 3 took a week."
Apple update doesn't push Safari 4 - you have to go to the apple website and download and install it yourself.
It looks to me like all they've done is rework Safari to make it emulate Chrome.
They pulled in a much, much newer version of Webkit including the new javascript engine Chrome does not use. They added a huge amount of support for HTML 5, CSS 3, XML, SVG 1.1 and a lot of other cool, new technologies that have been languishing. They added resolution independent zoom, anti-phishing, and revamped their plug-in architecture. Those speed and functional improvements are the major items in my mind. They changed up the UI and the tabs are more similar to Chrome, as is the default start page, but neither is quite the same and while more visible at first blush, are pretty minor.
So, you could use Safari and get the features of Chrome at a larger memory footprint or you could just run Chrome.
Or, if you're running OS X you can't run Chrome because they haven't even released a version yet.
. Chrome isn't as full featured as Safari, but covers 95% of what people need for normal web browser.
If you're on Windows I'd argue Safari isn't your best choice as a browser... but then that is not Safari's main market. On OS X it crushes most of the competition including Firefox. It is fast and has features that have not been cloned yet. You seem to take issue with browsers cloning the innovations of others, I wish other browser makers would do it. Every time I find myself on a Windows box using any other browser I wish I could expand text boxes (like the one I'm typing in now) to be able to see my whole comment. It's been years now.
I agree - the new title bar takes a little getting used to, but it recovers a fairly significant amount of dead space (all that blank space to the left and right of the selected tab's title, making it certainly worth a little bit of (initial) discomfort. As to the preference for the old way, it's easy:
sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
Okay, so it's not a checkbox, but meh - you only need to do it once.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Actually, you don't need sudo. (Unless you run safari as root). It's a 'per user' setting.
Firefox's add-ons aren't just plugins. They're browser extensions that can make the browser do just about anything and look just about anyway you can imagine. For example, there's an extension called 'All-in-One Sidebar' that basically adds Opera's sidebar functionality to Firefox. Before the Awesome Bar came into being, there were extensions that did this.
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